Adolf Hitler and WWII

Adolf Hitler, an Austrian war veteran and a
fanatical nationalist, fanned discontent by promising a Greater Germany,
abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, restoration of Germany's lost
colonies, and the destruction of the Jews, whom he scapegoated as the
reason for Germany's downfall and depressed economy. When the Social
Democrats and the Communists refused to combine against the Nazi threat,
President von Hindenburg made Hitler the chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933. With
the death of von Hindenburg on Aug. 2, 1934, Hitler repudiated the Treaty
of Versailles and began full-scale rearmament. In 1935, he withdrew
Germany from the League of Nations, and the next year he reoccupied the
Rhineland and signed the Anti-Comintern pact with Japan, at the same time
strengthening relations with Italy. Austria was annexed in March 1938. By
the Munich agreement in Sept. 1938, he gained the Czech Sudetenland, and
in violation of this agreement he completed the dismemberment of
Czechoslovakia in March 1939. His invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939,
precipitated World War II.

Hitler established death camps to carry out “the
final solution to the Jewish question.” By the end of the war, Hitler's
Holocaust had killed 6 million Jews, as well as Gypsies, homosexuals,
Communists, the handicapped, and others not fitting the Aryan ideal. After
some dazzling initial successes in 1939–1942, Germany surrendered
unconditionally to Allied and Soviet military commanders on May 8, 1945.
On June 5 the four-nation Allied Control Council became the de facto
government of Germany.

(For details of World War II and of the
Holocaust,
see
Headline History,
World War II
.)